This is an alias function to checkout a file or folder from another branch, mostly as a place to document it since I keep forgetting the syntax.

function gitmefile -d "Checkout folder or file from another branch" \
    --argument-names BRANCH PATH_TO_FILE

I originally called PATH_TO_FILE but that of course clobbered the PATH variable and all of a sudden it couldn't find git.

This is the git command, nothing fancy, although trying to read the documentation didn't make it obvious to me that this is what you should do.

git checkout $BRANCH -- $PATH_TO_FILE

The git error message when you pass it an unknown branch is fatal: invalid reference: <branch> which, in context is relatively easy to figure out, but is a little obscure at first glance, so I'll add an extra message in case there is an error.

if test $status -ne 0
    echo "There was a git error using your arguments: branch='$BRANCH' path='$PATH_TO_FILE'."

    string match --regex --quiet "(?<matched>$BRANCH)" (git branch)
    if test -z $matched
        echo "No branch matches '$BRANCH'."
    end
end

The option given to string match tell fish to use regular expressions instead of the default glob-type expressions and to not echo any matches it finds to the screen. The arguments to test don't have long-versions so I'll put them in a table to make it clearer.

• string-match - match substrings — fish-shell 3.6.1 documentation [Internet]. [cited 2023 Jun 5]. Available from: https://fishshell.com/docs/current/cmds/string-match.html
• test - perform tests on files and text — fish-shell 3.6.1 documentation [Internet]. [cited 2023 Jun 7]. Available from: https://fishshell.com/docs/current/cmds/test.html

• expect(1) - Linux man page [Internet]. [cited 2023 Jun 28]. Available from: https://linux.die.net/man/1/expect
• unbuffer(1): unbuffer output - Linux man page [Internet]. [cited 2023 Jun 28]. Available from: https://linux.die.net/man/1/unbuffer

This is the fragment to make sure the ssh-agent is running when you open the terminal.

if status is-login
    and status is-interactive
    if test -n $SSH_KEYS_TO_AUTOLOAD
        keychain --eval $SSH_KEYS_TO_AUTOLOAD | source
    else
        echo "SSH_KEYS_TO_AUTOLOAD environment variable not set"
        echo "add key-file-name(s) to this variable"
        echo "set --universal --append SSH_KEYS_TO_AUTOLOAD ~/.ssh/id_<keyid>"
    end
end

From the fish documentation for test.

-n STRING

Returns true if the length of STRING is non-zero.

I don't know why you'd use test -n instead of set -q. I suppose this allows for empty strings being set, although that seems odd…

Although the name keychain makes it sound like it's a general password manager, according to the man-page it's meant specifically to manage the ssh-agent. It will check if you already have an ssh-agent running and only start one if you don't. This way you don't end up starting one for every screen you open up.

The --eval option sends the SSH-Agent message to stdout, --quiet suppresses other messages, --quick tells it to use a running ssh-agent if it finds one without verifying the keys and then we pipe it to source to load the environment.

• Super User Answer that had this more robust way of adding and removing keys rather than hard-coding the file-name as I had it before.
• keychain(1) - Linux man page [Internet]. [cited 2023 Jun 24]. Available from: https://linux.die.net/man/1/keychain
• source - evaluate contents of file — fish-shell 3.6.1 documentation [Internet]. [cited 2023 Jun 24]. Available from: https://fishshell.com/docs/current/cmds/source.html
• status - query fish runtime information — fish-shell 3.6.1 documentation [Internet]. [cited 2023 Jun 24]. Available from: https://fishshell.com/docs/current/cmds/status.html

Abbreviations to hopefully make working with Nikola a little quicker.

abbr --add -- n "nikola"

For pass the password-manager. I was doing the pull and push commands but decided to use the git sync alias which is actuall calling legit sync, which I think does pretty much the same as what I was doing. It does other stuff like stashing uncommitted changes, but that should never happen when using pass. Anyway. Sync.

abbr --add -- p "pass"
abbr --add -- pgs "pass git sync"

• abbr - manage fish abbreviations — fish-shell 3.6.1 documentation [Internet]. [cited 2023 Jun 22]. Available from: https://fishshell.com/docs/current/cmds/abbr.html
• faho. Answer to “Fish shell; import config into main config” [Internet]. Stack Overflow. 2018 [cited 2023 Jun 23]. Available from: https://stackoverflow.com/a/48749763
• Document conf.d / config.fish sourcing order · Issue #3099 · fish-shell/fish-shell [Internet]. GitHub. [cited 2023 Jun 23]. Available from: https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues/3099
• Stack Exchange: Rsync progress information

The --export flag exports the shell variable to child processes, making it an "environment variable".

The current command-line interface is deprecated so it gets uninstalled when you install the GUI, but the GUI was having problems so I uninstalled it and went back to using the CLI, but depending on what is installed this may or may not work (and it is kind of slow so it may not be a good idea anyway). Everytime you open a shell this will run (e.g. a byobu window or SSH session).

# check the vpn (requires the installation of the proton-vpn command-line command)
if status --is-interactive
  protonvpn-cli status
end

The first thing the function does is change the file extension from whatever it is to "org". So whatever gets passed in as the argument should have an extension like ".rst". Then it runs pandoc.

• --standalone: by default pandoc strips out the header and footer, this option tells it to keep it (useful for nikola and most other thing I would imagine)
• --output: The output file name which pandoc also uses to guess the format we want to use.
• --wrap=none: by default pandoc will insert line-breaks to keep the lines within their default width, adding this argument keeps long lines as single lines.

• mb21. Answer to “Word to Markdown via pandoc: prevent line breaks in paragraphs” [Internet]. Stack Overflow. 2020 [cited 2023 Jun 22]. Available from: https://stackoverflow.com/a/62990248

The first option documented in the options section of the pandoc documentation is --from which then lists all the languages that pandoc can take as an input.

• pandoc general options [Internet]. Available from https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html#general-options

An alias function that will pick a random line (or lines) out of a text file.

Our alias function (choose) takes one required argument that we'll assign to the variable filename and one optional argument lines to indicate the number of lines to pull.

function choose -d "Random line from a file." --argument-names filename lines

I'm setting a string-format variable that I'll use to color error messages in bold red.

set ERROR "\x1b[31;1m\t%s\n\n\x1b[0m"

See this stack overflow answer for more explanation of the codes. Basically the 31;1m part turns on red (31) and bold (1) and 0m resets it back to unbolded black text.

This is getting a little convoluted but I added another check for the second argument to make sure it's a number so this flag is just there to indicate that it did or didn't look like right.

set OKAY 0

I'm setting it to False so that it has to pass the checks in order to be unset.

Unlike random, shuf will let you pick multiple lines so I added a second (optional) argument to indicate the number of lines to output. If none is passed in then it's set to one, if something other than an integer is passed in then we'll set a flag so we know to skip calling the shuf command later on.

• test -n "$lines" will return True if lines is non-empty so I negated it with ! to return True if it's empty.

if ! test -n "$lines"
  set lines 1
  set OKAY 1
else if ! test (string match --regex "^[0-9]+\$" $lines)
  set OKAY 0
  printf $ERROR "Not a valid number of lines: '$lines'"
else
  set OKAY 1
end

We'll be grabbing a line using the shuf command. shuf will hang if no filename is given and it will try and read binary files so first we have to test the filename to make sure it's a text file.

To do the check I'm using the file command which will have the word "text" in the output if we give it a text file. Then I feed the output from file to the string match command. This command defaults to only return true if the whole string matches so I added a glob to both ends of the "text" string to match any string that contains it. So, in order to pass the test filename has to have the name of a text file or we won't match the output of the file command.

First, though, we check if the lines argument was okay and if it was and filename passes its test then we can feed it to shuf.

if test $OKAY -ne 0; and test (string match "*text*" (file "$filename"))
   shuf -n $lines $filename

• test $OKAY -ne 0 will return True if OKAY != 0. It will return an error if OKAY holds something other than a number.
• the ; and syntax is a short-circuit syntax that won't run the second test if the first one fails.

If the number of lines wasn't okay or the filename wasn't valid then we'll emit a help message. Since we emitted any error message about the number

else
  if ! test -n "$filename"
    printf $ERROR  "**Missing Filename**"
  else if test $OKAY -ne 0
    printf $ERROR "Invalid File: '$filename'"
  end
  set OKAY 0
end # check filename

If it had a valid number of lines and a valid filename then OKAY will have a value of 1, otherwise it will have a value of 0 and we'll emit the help message.

if test $OKAY -eq 0     
  printf "\t%s\n" \
         "Output a random line or lines from a text file." \ \
         "Usage:" \ \
         "    choose <filename> [<number of lines>]"
end # help message

If the user passes in a flag as a filename this will get passed to the file command and in some cases this will cause it to emit a help message which will get passed to the shuf command. It's probably not a good idea to let that happen, but this was only supposed to be an alias so I wouldn't have to remember the syntax for shuf, so hopefully it'll work okay.

• string-match - match substrings — fish-shell 3.6.1 documentation [Internet]. [cited 2023 Jun 7]. Available from: https://fishshell.com/docs/current/cmds/string-match.html
• test - perform tests on files and text — fish-shell 3.6.1 documentation [Internet]. [cited 2023 Jun 7]. Available from: https://fishshell.com/docs/current/cmds/test.html
• shuf(1) - Linux manual page [Internet]. [cited 2023 Jun 7]. Available from: https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/shuf.1.html
• file(1) - Linux manual page [Internet]. [cited 2023 Jun 7]. Available from: https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/file.1.html

This an alias function to output a random hexadecimal number. There are many ways to do this but I took this from a StackOverFlow answer.

I'm going to create a function named randomhex that takes one optional argument named digits.

function randomhex -d "random hex string" --argument-names digits

The first thing to do is to check if the user passed in an argument and handle it if they did or use a default if they didn't.

Finally we output the random hexadecimal number that openssl generates.

echo $(openssl rand -hex $BYTES)

• OpenSSL rand [Internet]. [cited 2023 Jun 5]. Available from: https://www.openssl.org/docs/man1.1.1/man1/rand.html
• How to get a random string of 32 hexadecimal digits through command line? [Internet]. Stack Overflow. 2015 [cited 2023 Jun 5]. Available from: https://stackoverflow.com/q/34328759